The harsh, dangerous gig of seizing thousands of illegal cattle in the Amazon

Environmental agents from ICMBio, Brazil’s federal agency for conservation areas, were ready to seize around 2,000 cattle from the Jamanxim National Forest, in Pará state, when they saw themselves surrounded by 40 trucks.

The intimidation strategy from local ranchers, who were illegally raising the animals inside the protected area, also included a campaign on social media and a visit of local politicians to Brazil’s capital, Brasília, to dissuade federal authorities from proceeding with the operation. Some days later, a decision from a federal judge prevented the seizures of cattle of one of the ranchers.

“This is very frustrating,” Guilherme Alcarás de Góes, an ICMBio agent who was in Jamanxim, told Mongabay. “It was clear that there was some political articulation behind that decision.”

Facing political pressure is not the only challenge for those trying to remove cattle from illegally deforested areas in the Amazon. In 2o23, a team from ICMBio took four days only to open a path in the middle of the pasture in an illegal ranch in Nascentes da Serra do Cachimbo Biological Reserve, also in Pará.

“The grass was almost 2 meters [6.5 feet] high, so a horse couldn’t get through it, let alone drive a herd over it. We only had an old tractor there, so we had to try to open a corridor through the grass,” Góes said.

On another ranch, the pasture was full of trees and remains of downed tree trunks, making it difficult to round up the cattle. Not even the assistance of a helicopter, passing directions to the cowboys on the ground by radio communication, could solve the problem.

“Those of us who work more with the inspection of mining and deforestation realize that these cattle seizure operations are much more laborious,” Góes said.

Around 90% of the deforested areas in the Brazilian Amazon are converted into pasture for cattle. Unsurprisingly, one of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s top efforts to curb deforestation is to seize herds raised on Indigenous lands, in conservation units and in other illegally deforested areas.

Unlike environmental fines, the impact of sizing on the illegal ranchers’ pockets is immediate, dissuading new clearances and invasions. “The person is fined once, twice, three times,” federal agent Ronilson Vasconcelos Barbosa, the ICMBio coordinator in Pará’s municipality of Itaituba, told Mongabay. “Sometimes he manages to postpone payment in court, other times he doesn’t leave anything in his name [to be seized by Justice],” he said, referring to the use of front people to evade punishment for environmental crimes. “But when the cattle is seized, he’ll really suffer a loss.”

In 2023, Brazil’s federal government promoted three eviction raids, which seized more than 65,000 animals in Pará state. Most of them, more than 60,000 head of cattle, were taken from the Indigenous territories Apyterewa, Trincheira Bacajá and Ituna-Itatá.

But the work is far from over. Data from ICMBio show that at least 217,101 animals were illegally moved from protected areas in Pará from 2018-22. The data were collected from 756 environmental fines amounting to 215.6 million reais ($40 million), applied by ICMBio to individuals and companies who sold, bought or moved cattle raised in illegally deforested areas within eight conservation units.

The documents were obtained by the nonprofit Global Witness and Data Fixers, a project on environmental data hosted at Columbia University, and shared exclusively with Mongabay.

Most animals (85%) were raised in Jamanxim National Forest, the Amazon’s second-most deforested conservation unit, where the federal government is now facing strong political opposition. “To undo illegality when it becomes widespread has a political and financial cost,” Paulo Barreto, an associated researcher at Brazilian conservation nonprofit Imazon, told Mongabay.

From 2018-22, ICMBio reported the selling, buying, or transporting of 184,576 animals illegally raised in the area. One rancher alone has moved 8,150 cattle.

Despite the federal court decision, Góes estimated around 10,000 animals have been removed from the Jamanxim area since the beginning of the operation, most of them by the ranchers themselves, who were afraid of having their herds seized.

“Now the challenge is to prevent them from coming back because when we leave the area, many of these cattle return,” the ICMBio agent said.

War operation

Animals removed from protected areas are slaughtered and donated to public institutions, NGOs and social programs, according to federal environmental agencies.

However, taking thousands of animals from the depths of the Amazon to slaughterhouses poses a huge logistical and safety challenge, with risks ranging from life threats to traveling long distances on precarious, muddy roads.

Usually, the first three days are spent setting up a military-style camp, with tents, cafeteria and toilets. Since the camp is far from any city, the agents have to bring lots of water, fuel and food with them. “It’s a war operation,” Givanildo dos Santos Lima, an analyst from the federal environmental agency IBAMA, told Mongabay.

Lima coordinates the removal of thousands of cattle from Ituna-Itatá Indigenous land, in northern Pará, one of the most deforested in the country. The operation started in August 2023 and involved a task force including the Federal Police and the National Security Force.

Lima’s team also relied on cowboys hired to gather the cattle on the farms and truck drivers who moved the animals to the slaughterhouses — all of them became targets of ranchers and land-grabbers tackled by the authorities. “Many truck drivers give up because of the threats they receive. We’re working against bandits who use bandit tactics,” Lima said.

To lower risks, trucks were escorted by the federal road police all the way to the meatpacking facilities. Yet, the lack of professionals was a setback. “We couldn’t get an effective number of truck drivers to keep moving the cattle,” Lima said.

At the beginning of the operation, he estimated around 4,500 animals illegally raised inside Ituna-Itatá territory. The task force removed 1,800 of them up until January this year, when it was interrupted by the start of the rainy season — which makes the roads muddier and unusable.

Ranchers’ playbooks also include wrecking wooden bridges on the route of law enforcement officers. “Sometimes, they also set traps. They saw the bridges underneath so that when a heavier vehicle passes, there’s an accident,” ICMBio’s Barbosa said. Around 20 bridges were destroyed by land-grabbers during the operation in Ituta-Itatá territory, and IBAMA had to count on just a six-member team to fix the structures.

In 2023, during the operation in Nascentes da Serra do Cachimbo Biological Reserve, land-grabbers punctured the tires of official vehicles and fired shots against environmental agents.

“The atmosphere is tense all the time,” Lima described, adding that the violence of the cattle ranchers is directly proportional to the financial damage these operations mean for them. “A head of cattle costs around 3,000-5,000 reais [$600-$1,000]. So taking a thousand heads of cattle from a farmer is a huge loss.”

Politicians support illegal ranchers

Agents in the field also must deal with politicians willing to use eviction raids to please local voters. In Apyterewa Indigenous Territory, the raid was halted for 10 days in November after the federal government received complaints from members of Congress and local politicians. According to the Brazilian news outlet Repórter Brasil, some of these local leaders encouraged invaders to resist the authorities and remain in the area.

Apyterewa has been the Amazon’s most deforested Indigenous territory for the last four years, according to Imazon. Close to 60,000 head of cattle have been removed from the area, and an entire village built by land-grabbers was destroyed.

Political interests also play a key role in the invasion of Jamanxim National Forest. In 2016, former President Michel Temer supported ranchers’ interests by reducing its conservation area by 57%. The measure was revoked six months later, but it was long enough to keep alive hopes for the regularization of illegal settlements. “There are groups there who believe to this day that the conservation unit will be disengaged. This has generated false expectations,” Barbosa told Mongabay.

Another setback for eviction raids is the lack of support from the state agricultural defense agencies responsible for issuing cattle transit guides, known as GTAs. The document, designed to oversee vaccinations against foot and mouth disease in all national territories, has to be filled out every time an animal is moved from one place to another — whether its destination is a ranch or a slaughterhouse.

Pará’s agriculture defense agency, Adepará, has been supporting evictions. “According to health regulations, you can’t move any cattle without a GTA, so all our cattle removal actions are endorsed by the state’s agency,” said Lima, from IBAMA.

But Pará’s case is an exception. In the state of Amazonas, poor support from the defense agency, Adaf, prevented IBAMA from seizing 1,700 head of cattle from an area embargoed for illegal deforestation. The solution was to ask the rancher to move the herd to another property.

“When he [the rancher] sees that we haven’t been able to take action, he ends up coming back [to the same area],” IBAMA’s Lima said. “Today, in Amazonas state, ranchers are somewhat encouraged to continue occupying these areas because they know that the state government will never support the environmental agency.”

Mongabay emailed Adaf for comments, but the agency didn’t answer.

Cattle black box

GTAs are crucial not only to removing cattle from illegal areas but also to finding out where these cattle are being raised and who is buying them. Of the 756 fines applied by ICMBio in Pará, only 21% (161) targeted ranchers raising cattle in conservation units. The others (79%) were aimed at ranchers and slaughterhouses that bought these animals, besides two cases in which the driver was fined.

GTA is key to environmental control in a complex supply chain where animals pass through many ranches before being slaughtered. Some ranchers specialize in raising calves, some in the intermediate phase of the animal and others in fattening the cattle before sending them to the slaughterhouse.

The fines issued by ICMBio in Pará and shared with Mongabay were applied thanks to an agreement signed in 2018, in which Adepará committed to sharing GTA data with the environmental body. But it’s the only Amazon state with this kind of agreement. In most states, even the state environmental bodies can’t use the data to track illegal ranchers.

The federal government, which oversees the GTA systems from all Brazilian states, also keeps the data undisclosed. According to the Agriculture Ministry’s open data plan, GTAs should have been made public by December 2018. However, documents obtained by Data Fixers show the body backed down after stating it would risk rural producers’ physical and property security.

“There is no legal reason why they should not be available on the internet,” federal prosecutor Ricardo Negrini told Monbgabay. “I think any citizen should be able to go online and find out about the path of these cattle.” Negrini spent seven years in Pará’s prosecutors’ office, where he went to court to try to force Adepará to open GTAs. In the lawsuit, Adepará argued it couldn’t release the data because it would disclose personal information about ranchers, which according to the agency is illegal in Brazil. The case is still pending trial.

Banner image: Cattle by the side of the road in Brazilian Amazon. Image by Kate Evans/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

A web of front people conceals environmental offenders in the Amazon

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